NSF CAREER Award Supports Lixin Dong's Nanorobotics Research

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Lixin Dong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his research in nanorobotics, nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), and enabling nanomanufacturing technologies for fluidic, photonic, biomedical, and other nanosystems.

Funding from this five-year, $499,000 grant, which began January 15, will support the development of new nanotechnology for nanorobotics, including theory and processes for construction of systems, leading to new tools for manufacturing and other technology fields such as the electronics and microscopy industries. Optical nanoantennas have the potential to remarkably enhance energy adsorption for solar cells. Applications are also found in single molecule manipulation in biology, material characterization and inter-molecule interactions in supramolecular chemistry, and intelligent nanosystems in health care.

Dong earned his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from Xi’an University of Technology (XUT) in 1989 and 1992, respectively, and his PhD degree in microsystems engineering from Nagoya University in 2003. He became a research associate in 1992, a lecturer in 1995, and an associate professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering in 1998 at XUT. He became assistant professor of micro/nano systems and mechano-information in 2003 at Nagoya University. In 2004 he joined Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich as a research scientist, and was a senior research scientist there from 2005 to 2008, where he led the NanoRobotics Group in the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS).

He is a senior member of IEEE and serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering.

Within the past two years, eight College of Engineering faculty have been named NSF CAREER Award winners.